Engineering notes on AI, SaaS platforms and building software that ships.
Written from what we run in production across our own products and our clients'. For the long-form pieces, see Insights.
How to Choose a Software Development Studio Without Getting Burned
The questions, artifacts and contract terms that separate a studio that ships from one that bills you for six months of decks.
Designing an Admin Console You Can Safely Give to Support
How we scope, audit and impersonate inside internal tooling so a support agent can fix a tenant without becoming a security incident.
Field Service Apps That Keep Working With No Signal
Offline is not a degraded mode you bolt on later. It is the data model, the ID strategy and the conflict rules you pick on day one.
Scope an MVP That Ships in Weeks, Not Quarters
A decision rule for cutting scope, the five things you can never skip, and the parts of an MVP that quietly eat a quarter.
Feature Gating That Survives Your Next Pricing Change
Most entitlement systems break because pricing lives in the code. Here is the separation that keeps a plan change out of your sprint board.
Why Contractors Keep a Spreadsheet Next to the Software
Every construction platform loses to a spreadsheet somewhere. The fix is understanding which four jobs the spreadsheet is actually doing.
Build Versus Buy: Five Questions That Settle It
A decision rule for founders and CTOs choosing between an off-the-shelf platform and custom software, based on what actually breaks in production.
Billing Is the Hard Part: Mid-Cycle Plan Changes
Proration, entitlements and usage meters all disagree the moment a customer upgrades on day 14. Here is how we keep them consistent.
What Retail Software Must Get Right That ERP Never Does
Offline sales, per-location stock, marketplace listing state and returns are where generic ERP breaks in retail — and what to build instead.
What a Custom SaaS Platform Actually Costs to Build in 2026
A breakdown of where the money really goes on a custom SaaS build, why the second year costs more than you budgeted, and how to scope so the number holds.
Shared Schema or Database Per Tenant, and How to Decide
A decision rule for picking a tenancy model, based on running 100+ per-tenant Postgres databases and migrating them off a platform we then shut down.
How to Chunk Invoices, Plans and Contracts for Retrieval
Structured documents already tell you where the boundaries are. Splitting them by token count throws that away and you pay for it at query time.